Hitchhiking in a Starry Reboot of a Journey Through the Universe

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stars in a new version of Carl Sagan’s classic, debuting Sunday on Fox, National Geographic and eight other channels.CreditFox

It’s like trying to remake “Citizen Kane.”

In “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey,” which begins on Sunday, Neil deGrasse Tyson takes the guide-to-the-universe role filled in the original “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan, a man who was so good at popularizing science that the American Astronomical Society awards an annual public-communication medal in his name. The original 13-part series, broadcast on PBS in 1980, has been seen by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world and made a profound impression on many of them.

Don’t expect the new version to make that kind of television history. It may put up some pretty good viewership numbers, since it is being heavily promoted and shown on multiple outlets, including Fox on Sunday night and the National Geographic Channel on Monday. Hats off to Fox for putting a serious science program on network television in prime time, and hats off to Dr. Tyson for being committed to broadening our horizons.

But, at least from the first episode, “Standing Up in the Milky Way,” it’s hard to see the new program’s having the impact of the original. Dr. Tyson is genial and comfortable on camera, just as Sagan was. Yet the vehicle he is given doesn’t initially soar the way “Cosmos” 1 did.

That’s true in a basic sense: As in the original version, we are placed in a “ship of the imagination” that rockets through space, with Dr. Tyson as our Captain Kirk. In the new incarnation, the gimmick seems a little hokey, especially when Dr. Tyson is shown sitting Kirk-like, peering out the spaceship’s windshield. The ghosts of all the clunky outer space movies made since 1980 haunt this presentation.

And where Sagan’s narrative often approached poetry, Dr. Tyson’s can sound like an overwrought, overamplified planetarium show. (“The deeper waters of this vast cosmic ocean and their numberless worlds lie ahead,” he intones as the spaceship clears Pluto.) Perhaps that’s not surprising, since he’s director of the Hayden Planetarium, but the series needs to work harder to differentiate itself from an Imax movie.

The premiere seeks to put us humans in our place, emphasizing just how small a corner we inhabit in space and time. It works a calendar conceit that has been used by countless science teachers and such: If all of cosmic time were condensed into a calendar year, and today were New Year’s Eve, the last dinosaurs would have only just died on Dec. 30, and so on. If you haven’t heard this comparison before, it’s fascinating, but if you have, it may leave you suspecting that this program is aimed at the elementary school market.

Whoever is the target, the program does make a clear stand for inquiry and open-mindedness. It will be “one adventure with many heroes,” Dr. Tyson says early on, those heroes being people who advanced human understanding, sometimes against significant odds.

The first we meet is Giordano Bruno, who came to an unpleasant end in 1600 at the hands of the Inquisition for envisioning a vast universe rather than an Earth-centered one. The animation used to present his story resembles low-budget anime and isn’t terribly absorbing. Bruno deserves better.

Nit-picking aside, if the new “Cosmos” doesn’t deliver quite the punch of the original, it’s because this isn’t 1980. Since then, of course, personal computers have put a vast array of knowledge in almost everyone’s hands, and anyone with even a little curiosity about things scientific has been able to satisfy it easily. Television has been part of this, with good science programming like PBS’s “Nova” readily available. It’s a lot harder to be awed than it used to be.

By the episode’s end, though, Dr. Tyson has at least sketched a head-spinning cosmic landscape and instilled suitable admiration for how much we humans have managed to learn in our relative sliver of time. He has also thrown down a gauntlet; this program is a challenge to those who think we already know enough and who turn their backs on science.

So it will be interesting to see how its ratings match up against the numbers for “The Bible,” the mini-series that had its premiere at this same time last year and drew a huge audience for the History Channel. Presumably, at least part of that audience was from the segment of Christianity that affirms a seven-day creation a few thousand years ago.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hitchhiking in a Starry Reboot of a Journey Through the Universe. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe